The tightest race in the 2017 state election grew even tighter Monday as Del. David Yancey’s lead for the 94th District House of Delegates seat narrowed to just 10 votes after the Newport News Electoral Board completed its review of questioned ballots.

The outcome of the race could determine which party controls the House of Delegates.

But there will almost certainly be more ballots questioned, as Simonds confirmed that she plans to ask for a recount, after the State Board of Elections reviews all local electoral boards’ official reports of election results on Nov. 20. The state board will formally certify winners in the races for governor, lieutenant governor, attorney general and the 100 seats in the House of Delegates.

That recount, if granted by the Circuit Court of Newport News, would allow a first look at improperly marked ballots not counted by precinct tabulating machines — ones where voters might have marked their choices with an “X” or check mark or by circling names. The tabulating machines can’t read those marks. In the statewide recount of the race between Mark Herring and Mark Obenshain for attorney general in 2013, Herring’s lead of 165 votes widened to exceed 800 as such ballots were counted before Obenshain conceded the race and stopped the process.

“Numbers move around in a recount,” Simonds said.

Gretchen Heal, Yancey’s legislative aide, said his campaign is “completely confident” that the numbers won’t change.

“There’s no surprise there,” Heal said. “We expected there to be some shift in the numbers. This is kind of what we had projected.”

The provisional ballots that the city Electoral Board reviewed — there were 52 across the city, with 26 in the precincts of the 94th House district — are ballots voters cast when they’ve forgotten their ID, aren’t showing up on voter rolls or when there’s confusion about whether they voted absentee.

Len Bennett, Simonds’ attorney monitoring the closed-door Electoral Board review, said most of the provisional votes the board counted were from people who voted in person, but who had been sent absentee ballots that they did not cast. The board’s records of absentee ballots returned allowed these cases to be resolved fairly quickly.

Most of the others involved confusion about where voters were registered, and many of these cases involved Christopher Newport University students, he said.

In these cases, what generally happened is that the board’s check with the Department of Motor Vehicles for home addresses showed the students as not living in the district, he said.

One student, Holly Rice, who came to the board to make her case, said she had registered in a precinct that is in the 94th District for the 2016 presidential election but later renewed her drivers’ license using her parents’ address in a different part of the city. The board decided not to count her vote.

Yancey initially had a 12-vote lead, which widened to 13 after the Electoral Board reviewed precinct reports of results and compared them with the tabulating machine tapes on Wednesday.

The provisional ballot review is a normal part of post-election procedure that each local electoral board does to ensure that votes were counted correctly on election night.

On Monday morning, Newport News Circuit Court Judge Christopher Papile ordered the city’s registrar to release a copy of one envelope that a rejected absentee ballot was mailed in — information that Simonds and the Democratic Party of Virginia had sought through an emergency motion filed in court on Thursday.

Simonds’ campaign got a list of about 25 names of rejected absentee voters on Friday from the registrar’s office but still hadn’t received envelopes, which have signatures on them. They narrowed their request on Monday to one voter whose vote they believe was rejected in error.

The single voter is an 86-year-old woman whose eye condition, called macular degeneration, may have caused her to sign in the wrong place outside the ballot envelope, according to a sworn affidavit from the voter. The Simonds campaign tracked her down through the list they got on Friday, said Anna Scanlon, Simonds’ campaign manager.

The voter’s daughter served as her witness, and she, too, claims she tried signing the envelope but might have done it incorrectly, according to her own affidavit.

This ballot was mailed in to the registrar’s office with no signatures, so it was “rejected it at that point in time,” said Electoral Board Chairman Sean Devlin.

The Newport News Clerk of Circuit Court has the absentee ballot envelopes. Since a judge ordered the release of this single envelope, the clerk’s office must find that envelope and make it available for viewing. Once board members are able to look at it — likely Tuesday afternoon — they’ll check just the envelope to see if it has the required signatures.

Lawyers representing Yancey were granted a request to intervene in the case Monday morning since his campaign is also part of the process, Heal said. They claimed that the Clerk of the Circuit Court was in possession of the absentee ballot envelopes, so that office should have been included in the motion. However, lawyers on the other side said that when the injunction was initially filed, the registrar’s office still had everything.

Attorney Philip L. Hatchett also argued that it would be inappropriate for Simonds’ campaign to have the names of rejected absentee voters before Tuesday’s election results were certified.

“Are they going to take this ballot and ask them who they voted for?” Hatchett asked.

By that point, Simonds’ campaign was already obtaining a sworn affidavit from the one voter in question.

“Our position in this process overall is that everybody’s vote is counted,” Scanlon said. “David Yancey picked up some votes today, and I’m glad that those people who wanted their voices heard had their voices heard.”